State of Programming with Jeff Atwood

“The geeks won because somehow we tricked everyone into carrying around a computer with them!”

Stack Overflow is used by developers to find out how to build software. Stack Overflow is both a tool and a community, and today’s guest Jeff Atwood has made a career out of building tools and communities. As the co-founder of Stack Exchange and Discourse.org, Jeff has been solving the problem of civilized online communication for seven years.

In today’s episode of Software Engineering Daily, Jeff Atwood talks about building online communities from the perspective of an engineer as well as a sociologist.

Questions

How were you able to predict Atwood’s Law before the boom ofJavaScript?

What are the other changes you’ve noticed in programming since 2007?

Why didn’t you write the backend of Discourse in JavaScript?

Would you have chosen React over Ember if you started Discourse today?

How can you tell whether a framework will stand the test of time?

What do you think are the future implications of Docker, and where the product is going?

What have you learned from building Stack Overflow to now building Discourse?

From your interactions with developers, what in your mind is missing from the world of software engineering today?